Asymptosis: Always Approaching

Category: Evolutionary Psychology

  • Nassim Taleb: Two Myths About Rivalry, Scarcity, Competition, and Cooperation

    I’m delighted to find that someone with the necessary statistical chops has answered a question I’ve been asking for a while: Have any of the 130+ evolution scientists who’ve savaged Wilson and Nowak’s Eusociality paper (and Wilson’s Social Conquest of Earth) gone deep into the maths of their model (laid out in their technical appendix)? I check…

  • The Five Best Nonfiction Books

    Okay fine, not the best. (Click bait!) But for me, the most important — the five books that, more than any others, taught me how to think about the world. A friend in my “classics” book group asked me for nonfiction book recommendations. Here’s what I wrote: The NF books that wow me, get me…

  • More On Being Wrong

    Barry Ritholz links to Kathryn Schulz’s TED talk on Being Wrong (I wrote about her book here), and comments, I dont know about anyone else, but I am wrong all the time. I expect to be wrong. Which led me to clear up some of thinking that I’ve been doing since my last post on the…

  • Just Cause I Thought This Was Hilarious — For Multiple Reasons

    From Steven Jay Gould’s The Flamingo’s Smile: A hungry female black widow spider is also a formidable eating machine, and courting males must exercise great circumspection. On entering a female’s web, the male taps and tweaks some of her silk lines. If the female charges. the male either beats a hasty retreat or sails quickly…

  • Is This Person Liberal or Conservative? In One Question.

    The OK Trends blog on the OK Cupid dating site is pretty amazing. They pull all their hundreds of millions of pieces of data and suss out amazing facts about how people are, and how they interact. Here’s a beaut re: politics and ideology (Jonathan Haidt, take note): The Best Questions For A First Date…

  • Jim Manzi Makes the Case for Doing Whatever We’re Doing Right Now — Or Nothing

    I have to start this post by saying how much I like Jim’s recently-bruited notion (and coinage): “causal density.” I’ve been sharing it with my friends. In my words: An event in physics — a ball being bit by a bat and landing in center field  — has very few causes, so it’s pretty easy…

  • Why Would We Rather Be Wrong than Perceive Ourselves as Being Wrong?

    Why would we rather perceive ourselves as right than be right? Why does believing ourselves to be right feel so good? People hate being wrong. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes sense. If we’re wrong about the world out there, we’re less likely to survive and produce grandchildren. You’d expect being wrong to feel bad,…

  • What’s Wrong with Free Markets: “The ‘Wisdom’ of the Crowds”

    This may seem obvious to many, but it’s been very clarifying for me. People often argue against the free-market system — which is based on the idea of rational actors — by saying “people are obviously not rational actors!” But that’s a stupid argument. It misses the point. Nobody thinks that everyone, always, makes rational…

  • Delight and Abject Dismay on Richard Dawkins’ Birthday

    Another of those convergences: I just joined the Richard Dawkins group on Facebook, and discovered that today is his birthday. (Happy birthday sir!) It’s a convergence because over the last week I’ve been horribly dismayed. After decades of near hero-worship on my part, I’ve discovered that he is not acting as the man I’ve always…

  • Can John Gottman Predict Divorce? (Probably Not.)

    Update: Instead of saying “Probably Not” in the title, I probably should have said “We have no idea.” Being a Seattle parent with kids in private schools, I’ve been assailed for years by pronouncements and lectures by and about the Seattle-based Gottman Institute (tagline: “Researching and Restoring Relationships”). Their most widely known claim is their…

  • Is Altruism Inevitable?

    In one of those wonderful confluences, two items just came together for me. I read The Social Atom by Mark Buchanan, and my friend Steve posted a link to an Economist piece on evolution, fairness, markets, and religion. It all circulates around a central conundrum that evolutionists (including Darwin) have been worrying at since Darwin:…

  • Do Moral Intuitions Change in Different Situations?

    In response the Jonathan Haidt’s comment on Bryan’s post: One of my biggest questions about Haidt’s work: are people’s moral intuitions consistent across different situations? We know that behavior is often not generalized across situations. i.e. interventions in children’s homes/families have little or no effect on their behavior at school. I wonder if survey choices…

  • Libertarians, Republicans, and Democrats: New Findings on Morality, Empathy, and Sympathy

    Will Wilkinson returns me to a subject of fascination to me — the different moral weightings employed by Republicans and Democrats — and points out new findings about the moral weightings of Libertarians. To recap a previous post on research by Jonathan Haidt, as recounted in an article by Steven Pinker: Republicans care equally about…

  • Reason and Intuition: Is There Really Any Difference?

    My sister just sent me the link to this discussion by Razib Khan on reason and intuition–timely, because it refers to Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives by Michael Specter, who I just saw (and spoke to briefly) when he spoke at University of Washington last week…

  • Ratings Agencies and Real-Estate Appraisers: How Do You Keep ’em Honest?

    Megan McArdle points to an interesting suggestion from Joe Wiesenthal at Clusterstock: form a pool of say, ten certified ratings agencies. When an issuer wants a rating, they are assigned an agency by lottery. They can’t go shopping for the best rating. I’ve suggested exactly the same lottery-type system for real-estate appraisers. We’ve been hearing…

  • The American President: Why IQ Matters

    In a recent post I pointed out that Humans are Pathologically Nuts. In particular they’re forever playing obvious win-win games as if they were zero-sum or worse, and everybody loses as a result. Now I come across this study (PDF) showing that there’s a significant correlation between lower IQ and that very type of irrational…

  • Humans are Pathologically Nuts: Proof Positive

    I’ve often commented that if human beings are the (or a) result, it wasn’t a very intelligent designer. The most telling demonstration I’ve seen recently is a series of experiments conducted between 1959 and 1962, reported in wonderfully readable form in Morton Davis’s Game Theory: A Nontechnical Introduction. I recommend this book not only for…

  • Women Rule! So Why Do They Tart Themselves Up?

    I've always wondered: why do women go in for elaborate clothing, makeup, and all those other things that (along with certain innate characteristics) make them so alluring to us males, while men dress relatively drably? It's not universal, of course, but it's the rule throughout much of the world. Among pre-agricultural peoples, primates, almost every…